The map of this battle was a strange stonehenge that took up a large amount of space. More than thousands of column-like stone pillars stood irregular in the desert. The stone columns were of varying height and sizes.
The thinnest of them were as thin as a flagpole and the thickest of them were as thick as a tower. There were gaps between the pillars, but they were totally irregular as well. A moon hung in the sky. The wind blew lightly and there were wisps of cloud blocking out the moonlight. This was the perfect environment for an assassin to operate.
The sand would muffle any sound made by one's footsteps. Combined that with the howling wind, it was very hard for the opponent to perceive Xiao Tan's movement. The strange pillars provided Xiao Tan with an endless cover that he could use. Even if Xiao Tan had been spotted by his enemy, with just three to five steps, he would disappear from his opponent's line of sight.
Under this condition, if one player was a close-quarter expert that focused on building his speed and the other was a sniper specializing in marksmanship, then basically the battle would be lost before it even started for the latter.
And this battle started with this kind of predetermined condition…
Some of you readers might be wondering, even though the matching of the two players was randomly but the creation of the map should be decided according to the data of the two players, why would the system generate a map that was highly disadvantageous to one of the parties? The answer was very simple… because this map did not have much negative influence on Sky Song…
Ho ho ho!
Following this continuous and dull sound, two shadows lashed out at Xiao Tan. From the moment the scenario started, this was the nth time that Xiao Tan had been assaulted by this attack. He knew very well that… even though the speed of this attack was not fast, the force behind it was heavy and the angle that they came at him was hard to predict.
If he used his own body to block them, he would lose quite a large amount of Life Points. Therefore, he could only twist his body in different unique angles to avoid the attacks while keep moving forward to find his target.
"If this is allowed to continue, I will eventually run out of stamina…" Xiao Tan gasped for air while keeping his feet moving. He thought to himself, Without even realizing it, my Life Points have been shorn down to half and I have lost one-third of my Stamina Points. I am no closer to getting to my opponent… Speaking of which, this is a curious long-ranged attack that he has… Could this be from a Sorcery Weapon?
Xiao Tan's speculation was not wrong. Sky Song, who was standing on top of a giant stone pillar controlling two boomerangs to make this super long-distance attack, was indeed using his Sorcery Weapon.
———
Item Name: Thunder Boomerang
Item Type: Sorcery Weapon
Quality: Excellent
Offense Point: Slightly Strong
Element: Electricity
Special Effect One: Return Flight (Sense the user's location and return back to the user's hands)
Special Effect Two: Homing Attack (lock down the target and make accurate attacks)
Special Effect Three: Echolocation (During return flight or homing attack, if the condition allows it, the weapon will sense and avoid all obstacles in its trajectory)
Special Effect Four: Thunder Strike (Release a powerful electric shock. Can be used in close-quarter combat. Within the one hour after using this effect, all the other special effect of the Thunder Boomerang will become invalid
Remark: In the year 1977, an Australian visitor accidentally died from a boomerang that he threw and returned to knock on the back of his head. But his soul traveled back millions of years to become a Koori[1]. And from there, he started a journey with plenty of surprises. Plenty of women who were willing to throw themselves at him. He traveled all over the Australian continent, killing demons and slaughtering bandits, becoming a legendary existence. Many years later, one of his weapons, appeared once again in a part of a multiverse and that was—Thunder Boomerang!
———
From the item description, one would realize that this thing would not be affected by the strange geography of the map. With the help of echolocation, the Thunder Boomerang could sense the presence of obstacles like a bat and did a suitable speed up, changing of direction to take a discourse over or around the stone pillars to come after its target.
Of course, this was not to say that Thunder Boomerang would definitely hit its target. After all, there was a detail that stated 'if the condition allows it', well, on the inverse side, that meant that there would be conditions that would render this special effect of Thunder Boomerang worthless.
For example, when the obstacle was a wall that was ten meters tall or the user was standing at the base of the battle and threw the boomerang out at forty-five degrees downward, these were all unsuitable conditions for the Thunder Boomerang. As powerful as this weapon was, it would not have started to twirl and spin just as it left the user's hand, and spun horizontally upward, rose over the wall from above, and then dipped downward to chase after the opponent…
Normally speaking, the user of the Thunder Boomerang, the general direction, and angle of the toss could not be too off the course and there could not be an exceptionally large obstacle between the user and the target… However, at a location like a water dam, that would perfectly showcase the strength of this Sorcery Weapon.
In any case, Xiao Tan was being cornered by the repeated accurate homing attacks from this weapon. About ten minutes ago, when the battle just started, Xiao Tan tried to get close to his opponent, but he was forced back by heavy artillery fire by his opponent. At the time, Xiao Tan did not panic. He was one with plenty of patience and he managed to keep his composure under that situation. He thought to himself, At the worst this will become a drawn-out battle. As long as I can use the cover to sneak in an ambush here and there, eventually, you will run out of bullets.
But… Sky Song's Sorcery Weapon did not have an ammo limit; it could be used again and again. Therefore, Xiao Tan was trapped in this difficult situation. If he forced himself to get close to Sky Song, he would be turned into a sieve before he had a chance to do anything; and if he stayed away… the man would have continued his harassment with the Sorcery Weapon.
In any case, Sky Song's tactic was to stick to one formula, guarding his ground and use long-range attacks to keep on harassing Xiao Tan. And from the beginning until now, be it Life Points or Stamina Points, it was Xiao Tan who had been depleting them.
"Tch… If not for that boomerang, this kind of camping style tactic will be deemed as AFK-like behavior a long time ago…" As Xiao Tan evaded the attacks from the boomerang, he mumbled under his breath. "What can I do…" If Feng Bujue was here, he probably would have come up with more than ten shameless counter-tactics already. But in terms of strategizing, Xiao Tan was one who mainly 'followed his feelings'. Sometimes, when he was struck by inspiration, he would come up with a strategy that surprised everyone. But most of the time, he was far less inventive and innovative as those players who relied on their strategies and brain.
"Wait a minute… even if the man's attack has homing effect… how did he lock on to my position among the stone pillars?" Finally, after ten minutes of running for his life, Xiao Tan realized this question that should have occurred to him sooner. This was night-time and he was already more than one hundred meters away from his opponent. He was surrounded by stone pillars that reached into the sky so how did his enemy have a lockdown on his location?
"Is it a kind of skill that can sense one's heat and temperature?" Xiao Tan tried to think. Hmm… This has been going on for more than ten minutes and his attack has not stopped for even a moment, if it is an active skill, it would have drained him of his resources already. So, it must be a passive ocular skill?
He soon vetoed that possibility.
That can't be it… A passive skill that only allows the person to see in heat vision would mean that he would be greatly hindered during normal sight. A skill as negative as that should not exist.
Ho ho ho ho!
Another string of consecutive attacks. Xiao Tan leaped against the stone pillar next to him, somersaulted in the air, and evaded the boomerangs again.
"If it is not a skill… then it has to be some kind of equipment." Xiao Tan thought to himself. "I do not think this is the result of Soul's Eye…" Even though he had heard the description of Soul's Eye from Brother Jue and Sister Rain before, since he had not personally experienced or used that skill before, he only had half an understanding of it.
Furthermore, Soul's Eye was not that common. It was extremely rare and not every player would have access to it. When I saw him earlier, I did not see anything he wore on his face… but an accessory around the face area can be hidden. In other words…
With this thought in mind, Xiao Tan leaped into the air. He chose a large stone pillar that was several meters wide in width. He stepped on the horizontal surface of the stone pillar and started to run around the pillar itself. After running a few circles around the pillar, with another leap, he landed on the next pillar and repeated the same thing…
At the same time, Sky Song who stood at a high vantage point several one hundred meters away really did stop his attack. Because something strange appeared in his heat sensory googles—around the clear heat profile of his opponent, there was a blurry high-temperature area. It was like an orange haze, covering up the tracks of his enemy.
"What is he doing…" Sky Song said to himself. "Did he start a fire?" With that in mind, he quickly turned the goggles to the shown mode and lifted them over his eyes. He used his naked eyes and looked down the distance. But the only thing that he saw was a piece of darkness.
That was to be expected… The footprints that were left behind by Xiao Tan's Traces of Gales was burning a black flame.
"Huh?" Sky Song put on the heat sensory googles again and realize the size of the high-temperature zone had started to increase…
On the other side, seeing that the enemy had stopped attacking, Xiao Tan knew that his tactic had worked. He increased his speed and darted and danced between the many stone pillars. He left behind as many burning footprints as he could to disrupt the dependency of his opponent had on heat sensory tracking.
"What the hell is going on…" Sky Song lost track of his opponent and in that moment. He was feeling slightly panicked and his Terror Points rose slightly. "There is no fire, but the zone of high-temperature is getting bigger and bigger… He would not have gone around splashing high temperature alcohol, right?"
Without the ability to triangulate the location of his opponent, his Sorcery Weapon lost its use, the special effect of Homing Attack could not be activated. Xiao Tan used this opportunity to slowly get close to the area where his opponent was and started to create a zone of burning footprints around the location where Sky Song had set up his camping site.
"He is a player from a gaming studio. His overall ability will be better than mine. Even though he is the same level as I am, he has the advantage in terms of a wealth of skill and equipment. With more choices, it is only natural for him to find a better pairing in terms of his skills, weapons, and equipment…" After Xiao Tan had shaken loose from his cornered disadvantage, he had started to strategize how to counter. "But… he is not a player on the combat stat ranking so he will not be impossibly stronger than I am… If I can catch an opening on him, create an advantage for myself, and combine it with the geographical location and timing… I have the chance to win this match."
"Has he arrived?" Sky Song was not dumb. When he realized the area around him had risen in temperature and the area was closing in on him, he naturally knew that the opponent was threatening close to him.
"Tch…" Sky Song removed the heat sensory goggles. After all, all he could see through the googles… was a zone of orange haze. Wearing them was pointless. "Ha ah… Hu…" Sky Song repeated several deep breaths to calm himself down so that his hands that had started to shake would steady themselves. He and his big sister, Not a Scaredy Cat, were the complete opposite in terms of personality. His big sister was a ruthless female gang leader but Sky Song, to put it nicely, was a more reserved and graceful person, and to be frank, he was a sissy.
Sky Song chose to focus on marksmanship as his mastery because he wanted to avoid close-quarter combat as much as possible (He joined the game during the closed beta. At the time, there was no Sorcery or Summoning mastery to be chosen yet). He grew up being a punching bag for his older sister, so the psychological trauma of physical conflict had been sewn into his heart since he was young. From the camping style of his tactic, it was not hard to see that the kid's fighting style was to take down the opponent without giving them the chance to get close to him.
Tsk tsk!
Suddenly, two whispers of a sound came from Sky Song's left-hand side. Without saying anything, he whipped the barrel of the machine gun that had been placed on the tripod around and unloaded a blanket of bullets. But after losing the aid from the heat vision goggles, the man had no idea what exactly he was shooting at.
"The blast from the machine gun is not strong enough to clear away the shadows between the stone pillars and the sound of the cartridge falling and the gunshots can help cover the sound of my movement…" Xiao Tan hid behind one of the stone pillars and thought about it carefully. "My speculation was right… He was using some kind of heat tracking device to confirm my location but now he is basically shooting barrels in the dark…"
Turns out the sound earlier was Xiao Tan grabbing two handfuls of sand and throwing them as hard as he could above the stone pillar. It was a purposeful test. At that moment, the condition of the match had a complete turnaround. Wang Tanzhi was like a beast lurking in the dark, testing out the reaction and reflex of his enemy with ease to find the opening where he could deliver a fatal blow.
And our friend, Sky Song… after his tactic had been seen through by his opponent and not only that, undermined by Xiao Tan, he became the one who was cornered. As a player who focused on marksmanship, Sky Song's vision was not that bad but Xiao Tan was hiding in the darkness and his outfit melted perfectly into the dark (Xiao Tan's assassin creed's outfit had a dark red jacket with a golden lapel). To capture Xiao Tan's movement in the dark with naked eyes was extremely difficult.
In contrast, Xiao Tan who also had Level C in sleuthing did not have that problem at all… Sky Song had not moved from the stone pillar where he set up his camp. He used that spot as his vantage point and defense point. Xiao Tan only needed to poke his head slightly out from behind the pillar and he could see his opponent clearly.
"Hah… Hah… Hah…" Sky Song tried to keep the sound of his breathing as shallow as possible. Fear made his hearing and vision sharper and he thought to himself, I need to calm down… The opponent is just testing me. I must not fall for it.
He calmed down slightly.
I am being too nervous… there was no need to fire so soon. I am on the higher vantage point and I have the gun. No matter how fast he is, he will not have teleported beside me in the blink of an eye. During the start of the match, he was forced back away from me because of that… things would not have changed now either.
He had made up his mind.
Yes! I will only start firing when he appears concretely in my line of sight. Firing aimlessly will only give him the opening he needs to get close to me.
Tsk tsk!
Another sound evoked in the dark. This time Sky Song turned his head around with alert. He focused his eyes down that direction but did not pull on the trigger.
Fu fu fu!
Following the earlier movement, another sound floated out from the dark, but it stopped three seconds later.
He did not fall for it this time? Xiao Tan thought. He wanted to use the same trick twice and use the sand toss to distract the enemy and when Sky Song fired, he would run to his blind spot, leap up the stone pillar and complete the assassination. But to his consternation… after he tossed the sand and leaped swiftly between two stone pillars, his opponent still had not made a move…
Therefore, Xiao Tan quickly pulled back. He squished his footsteps into the sand and cloaked himself in the darkness again. In these few short minutes, neither of them spoke and neither used any skill or ultimate. This match of pitting two players' wit and courage against each other had reached its climax.
Suddenly, a wind picked up…
The sound of the wind swished through this strange arrangement of stone pillars, it sounded like the wailing of a poor woman. With the push from this desert gale, a dark cloud slowly moved to cover up the moonlight…
At the same time, with a 'splat', a lick of light appeared behind one of the stone pillars. Then a man wearing a miner's hat walked out from behind it. With the moon blocked behind the clouds, the spark of light was so conspicuous in the dark, the miner's hat itself was a bright yellow. It was impossible for one to miss it.
"Hey… now you are just underestimating me." In that moment, this comment entered Sky Song's mind, but his hands did not stop moving. He immediately aimed the gun at Xiao Tan and pulled the trigger. However, at that moment, that bit of light morphed into a moving beam of light.
Sky Song had predicted that the man would not stand there and wait for him to shoot at him. Moving at high speed was a measure that he had expected. "Humph… You want to force your way to me? Do you think you can run faster than a bullet?"
Of course, Xiao Tan could not run faster than a bullet. At least, for now, he could not. But he did not need to be faster than a bullet. He only needed to be fast enough to fool his enemy's pair of eyes…
The machine gun howled, and the blanket of bullets came at Xiao Tan. At the same time, the singular light source dissolved into two and then one second later, into three in the darkness. The three blurry light sources appeared and disappeared as they spiraled their way up the stone pillar.
"I knew you would use this skill!" Sky Song did not panic. When Xiao Tan tried to break through the firing zone for the first time, he had already used Ephemeral Shade before. Now, he wanted to use the same method to get close to Sky Song, but the latter was not so easily fooled.
"This time, the result will not be any different!" Sky Song adjusted the angle of the barrel slightly and increased the coverage of the bullet blanket. The three shadows were all in the gun's firing zone. Last time, he used this method to chase Xiao Tan back and he managed to nick quite a bit of Life Points from Xiao Tan. But this time, something that he did not understand happened.
One, two, three… all three light spots disappeared one after another.
Darkness descended once more and before Sky Song's eyes… there was nothing.
"They were all illusions?" At that moment, Sky Song's Terror Points shot through the roof. "Then where is the real person?"
He soon got the answer to that question. A cold sleeve blade pierced into Sky Song's throat from the back of his neck. It slashed through his spine and the cold steel poked out from the front of his throat. Fresh blood squirted out in a spray of mist in the dark and was carried away by the wind.
Ten seconds away…
Xiao Tan ignored the depletion of his Life Points and purposely switched on the light on his miner's hat. Using the skill of his shades, he forced his way forward toward the stone pillar. When he reached a certain height, he left behind three shades and at the same time… reached up his hand to switch off the light on his miner's hat. Then, he curled his body inward and used Shadow of the Evil Bat at the stone pillar that was right before his eyes. Using the special effect of this skill… he teleported to the other side of the stone pillar.
Therefore, he successfully vanished within his opponent's line of sight.
Three seconds later, under the cover of the gunshots, Xiao Tan had sneaked up to the back of Sky Song and… took down his ninth consecutive win.
[1] Koori is a demonym for Aboriginal Australians from the approximate region of New South Wales and Victoria. For some people and organizations, the use of indigenous language regional terms is an expression of pride in their heritage. The word "Koori" is from the word gurri or guri in Awabakal, an Aboriginal Australian language that was spoken in the area of what is today Newcastle. It is sometimes spelled 'koorie'; also, in coastal areas of far northern New South Wales, it is sometimes pronounced with a harder 'g' sound and is written as 'goori' or 'goorie'. They were a migratory tribe and did not have a fixed base location and were spread throughout the land of Australia. Before the Europeans came to colonize Australia, there were about five hundred Koori tribe villages and the population was about 750,000 people
